Which Is Scarier: Trump Being the President, or Trump Picking the President?

So the Trump machine rolls forward, with the Orange One now boasting nearly five times as many confirmed delegates at this point than his competitors. I’m not necessarily lamenting that, because I think the GOP is generally insane and evil, and it’s not like I’d be happier if Cruz was in the lead. But while part of me wishes the media had never fueled the Trump Express to give it this kind of momentum, I must admit that the spectacle is fascinating. It’s like performance art.

And that’s the thing. It’s so perfect, I have a hard time believing it’s real. Therefore I have concluded that Trump isn’t a real candidate. His candidacy is a performance meant to lead to his actual goal, which is not to govern the country. What is he planning? I have a theory.

Donald Trump doesn’t want to be President, but he wants to pick the President.

I wouldn’t mind picking the President. One might say it’s the next best thing to being President, but I think it’s actually better. There was a time when I wanted to be President, but it turns out that running the country might kind of suck.

I think that while Donald Trump’s megalomania makes him love the idea of the presidency, deep down he surely knows that he’s in no shape to run this country. He’s already declared that he’d pick a Washington insider as his running mate. Duh; he needs someone who actually knows how to be a politician.

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution declares that if the President resigns, the Vice President becomes President. If Trump wins, he can go through the Inauguration process and immediately resign. His running mate would become president, and lo and behold, Donald Trump would have singlehandedly selected the President of the United States. It’s not a bad gig.

Or, if Trump’s megalomania is so out of control that he wants to see if he can singlehandedly disrupt American constitutional law and force the country to operate without a President for a period of time, he’s got a way to do that too.

There is no rule for what happens if the President elect withdraws before being inaugurated. The Twentieth Amendment mandates that the Vice President elect becomes President-elect and will be inaugurated if the President-elect dies before being inaugurated. It also mandates that if the President-elect fails to qualify for the office, then the Vice President-elect becomes President on an interim basis until a President qualifies. This provides some basis for an argument that the election should pass to the Vice President-elect if the President-elect withdraws rather than dying. In that case, we’d have an identical situation to that if Trump got inaugurated: Trump would have picked the President.

I find it unlikely, though, that the players involved would make it that easy. There would be lawsuits all over the place. Trump and the VP-elect would try to push through the VP-elect’s inauguration. Congress would argue that they should be empowered to pick the president according to the contingencies provided for in the Twentieth Amendment. The GOP would insist that it should have an opportunity to replace its nominee. It would be a clusterfuck, and it would take months to figure out.

During those months, who would be President?

I’m fairly certain that in a situation where no one knows who can be inaugurated and the sitting president is ineligible to continue due to having served two full terms, the job of running the country would go to the sitting VP.

Hmmm. Maybe Biden will get his shot after all.